GeekFest Sharjah Is An Olives Free Zone

There’ll probably be a collective sigh of relief at this – GeekFest Sharjah 1.0 takes place tonight at the Al Maraya Art Centre located at Sharjah’s delightful canal-side Al Qasba and it’ll be an Olives Free Zone. No readings, no talks about the book and not a copy on sale.

GeekFest is an offline gathering for online people that takes place sporadically around the Middle East and features geeky talks, demos, workshops and other fabulous things. There have been GeekFests in Cairo, Damascus, Amman, Beirut, Abu Dhabi and, of course, Dubai - and GeekFest Jeddah is to take place next month. It's something I didn't set out to start and have never attempted to organise, it's just sort of happened. You can find out more here.

Instead I’ll be giving a talk about Sharjah’s history, particularly the role of Imperial Airways, which used to form part of the global network of air-routes that tied together the British Empire in the years before World War Two brought that very Empire to its knees and closed that rich chapter in history.

In the 1930s, massive Handley Page biplanes took off from Croydon Airport and carried their passengers around the world in journeys that took days, compared to the weeks and months that sea and land journeys used to take. Documented in the important 1937 documentary film Air Outpost, these leviathans of the sky landed in Sharjah for an overnight stay at Mahatta Fort, today preserved as a museum in the centre of modern Sharjah. It's a little known fact that the road by Sharjah's 'Saudi Mosque' is, in fact, the old runway. I've long been fascinated by Mahatta and its history, so thought I'd share that tonight, as well as screening the original film.

And not an olive in sight! :)

Arab Hospitality

 Chai Nana - image:Nicholas Malfait

Abdullah Zahlan had arranged my meeting with the Minister the next day, so I found myself sitting on the leather sofa outside Harb Al Hashemi’s office, drinking a little gold-rimmed glass of thyme zaatar tea as I waited for the big panelled doors to open. When they did, a little grey-haired man in a blue-grey suit shot out, a pile of papers clutched in his arm as he paddled a fussy wave of effusive thanks and effendi’s to Al Hashemi’s crisp, efficient secretary, who ignored him.
   ‘You can go in, now, Mr. Stokes.’
Olives, Page 127

Formal meetings in the Arab World often still involve little gold-edged custard glasses of ‘chai’ in various forms, from ‘chai suleimani’, a sweet bronze-coloured infusion of tea, almost certainly Lipton to ‘chai nana’, tea with fresh mint steeped in it. And then there are the herbal and fruit teas you come across, most frequently ‘zaatar’, or thyme. I remember ginger tea waiting in Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s majlis, deep-pile carpets and mirrored walls all around me. And long, painful waits for short, painful meetings at the Ministry of Information in Dubai filled with a variety of teas brought to me in a procession of diuretic little delights. Those were the meetings back in the early ‘90s when I had fallen foul of someone with wasta, something that can’t, thankfully, happen in the same way to writers in the UAE today. Or to their kidneys.

In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait you’re just as likely to be offered ghawa, green unroasted coffee flavoured with cardamom and served in little cups from a long-necked brass coffee pot or, more likely these days, a long brass-necked coffee pot shaped thermos. It’s polite to accept a refill or, at most, two and then pass the cup back with a little waggle to signify you’re done. Two fingers over the cup will do instead of a waggle.

It's a little ritual that's tied into the age-old Arab traditions of hospitality that still dictate how you're received as a guest, whether it's sitting in a Jordanian government minister's waiting room or encountering a family while offroading in the Omani mountains and being invited into their home to share coffee and dates. Coming from a culture that's instinctually distrustful of strangers, it never fails to amaze me.

The Book Marketing Conundrum

I’ve been involved in a long-running debate with a group of writer pals (the shadowy and feared ‘Grey Havens Gang’) about the greatest downside of self publishing for many writers – the fact it entails promoting your own work. Most writers seem to find the whole process of promotion deeply counter-intuitive, but it's increasingly the case that, regardless whether you're conventionally published or self-published, you need to drag yourself out and stand on that street corner.

I had long held out for a publisher to take up my work for two key reasons: validation and scale. A publisher signing you as a writer, so my thinking went, validates you as such. It’s now you can change your profession in your passport to ‘author’. Oh, how wrong I was to prove myself in that one. The other reason, scale, was simple. A publisher would get your onto all those shelves for all those eyeballs to see your cover and pick you up.

These turned into two of the key reasons I decided on self publishing. Firstly, I was signed up by an agent, which meant that someone who knew what they were doing considered me publishable.  This, I realised, was validation enough. Secondly, writer friends who had been signed by publishers were bitter about how little scale was actually on offer from publishers unwilling to invest in books that weren’t sure-fire supermarket sellers.

Seriously. Here’s one of the rejections of Beirut from a top London publisher:

“There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context.”

And yet if a publisher has a single remaining attraction for authors, it is that the author can ‘get on with writing and let someone worry about the other stuff’, like formatting, editing, printing and, critically, marketing the book. It's at the marketing stage many writers find themselves being told to blog and tweet by publishers - to effectively do the heavy lifting in an online environment. The lack of focus given the 'mid-list' by the sales and marketing teams has left many writers tied to a publisher and cast adrift in the wilderness.

But as more authors turn to self publishing, there is a vast and exponentially increasing legion of writers clamouring for people’s attention. All too often, this consists of little beyond ‘read my book read my book read me book’, which soon becomes very wearying for the victims. It’s got to the point where readers on platforms such as the Kindle Forums and GoodReads are hyper-sensitive to the faintest whiff of self-promotion by authors and slam them accordingly.

So what can a writer do?

Attend my workshop at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai this Friday, of course! There I’ll be sharing tips and tricks for promoting your book and getting people to read it without just screaming repetitive promotional messages all the time. There are still seats, priced at Dhs200, and you can sign up at the handy link below. A warning before you decide to listen to what I've got to say: I'm not Amanda Hocking - the Olives project is still very much in its early days...

How to Get Noticed and Sell Your Book with Alexander McNabb
Self Publishing and Promoting Your Book in a Digital Age
Friday 9 March 17:00-19:00Al Waha, InterContinental Hotel
Tickets are available by clicking on this here handy, rinky-dink link.

(Yes, this whole post was an evilly conceived plug for my #EAFOL workshop. Sorry 'bout that... :)

Driving in Jordan

Water flicked through the car’s open window, lashing my eyes. I raced through the city streets, the engine screaming and tyres hissing on the wet tarmac. I broke out into open country and a vista of cypress-dotted hills and rock outcrops before the road looped back into the suburbs.
   I sped around a tight corner in a hilly residential area. The tyres hit a bad road repair and I slid out of control across the smooth, treacherous bitumen. The car spun a full circle before bumping against the kerb, not a damaging impact, but heavy enough to jolt me into awareness of my surroundings.
Olives, Page 191

Paul’s driving has obviously not been improved by his time in the Middle East. This is hardly a surprise, driving across the region is generally appalling and rarely less than bonkers. There are some regional hotspots – Cairo really takes the biscuit, it’s the one place in the Middle East where I’ve always managed to avoid driving, but that hasn’t really helped, as being driven around by a maniac with a clear death-wish is only barely preferable to taking matters into your own hands and trying to carve your own path through the impossible, choking traffic.

The GCC is a tad more gentlemanly these days, the UAE, Dubai in particular, has calmed down following a somewhat draconian crackdown by Dubai' radar-toting police (the Emirate features a fixed rader every 2km on most roads and mobile 'sneaks' on top of that). I do recall in Saudi Arabia during the 1980s, if you waited too long at a roundabout, the guy behind you would just shove you in with his bumper. Lebanon, too, has calmed down as drivers have become used to the fact you don’t need to avoid snipers anymore. It’s taken the best part of 20 years for that to sink in, mind you. And Beirut's traffic lights are still occasionally regarded as a pretty display to brighten up the roadside rather than an actual instruction to behave in a certain way.

I’ve never had the slightest hesitation in driving in Jordan, though. Amman’s rush hour can get pretty hectic these days and roundabouts are still an invitation to play chicken and ignore any such facile concept as right of way. The roads are still, in the main, pretty badly maintained, too. But muddling your way through the snarling lanes of traffic, the usual pile of people, choking fumes and honking horns, somehow doesn’t seem as, well, potentially fatal as Cairo does. And once you’re out in the country, windows open and cypress-dotted hillsides speeding past, you’re in heaven...

How To Self Publish Your Book In The UAE

Next Friday, I’m giving a two hour workshop on how to self publish your book and then how to roll up your sleeves (or pick up your skirt hem to show a bit of leg) and promote it. The workshop’s taking place as part of the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature taking place in Dubai next week and costs UAE Dhs200 to attend, none of which, tragically, sticks to my hands. However, if you’re serious about publishing your own book, I can pretty much guarantee to save you that money in wasted research, mucking about and spending time waltzing up quite as many blind alleyways as I did as I worked things out.

Self publishing in the UAE is slightly different to anywhere else in the world, in that you can’t really solely rely on the online platforms that have revolutionised publishing elsewhere. You can’t get paid-for content from Amazon or any other major e-book retailer in the region, simply because none of them have ‘switched on’ the Middle East (it’s not a rights issue, I know this because I opened world rights to ‘Olives’ on Amazon and they still won’t sell it to people from the UAE).

So you really have to go the traditional route to serve the home market and print a book, which is something of a mission in itself, from finding printers through to gaining permission to print and getting an ISBN number issued. I have documented much of this journey over at the Fake Plastic Souks blog.

Should you self publish at all? Why not hold out for an agent and a publisher to come knocking down your door and make you rich beyond your wildest dreams? When you wake up and get that whiff of coffee, how can you take matters into your own hands? What are the pluses and minuses of self-publishing? Which e-book platforms to pick? What formatting requirements are there for different e-book types? What about editing? What does self-publishing cost and what, if anything, should you be paying for? What are the pitfalls and highlights? What lessons have I learned the hard way in deciding to self-publish Olives?

Once we’ve gone over all that, it’ll be on to promoting your e-book (and your self-published book). How can you stand out among the many – and exponentially increasing – voices out there in the wilderness? I can't claim to have all the answers to this one, but again I can certainly share some hints and tips from my own well-travelled road!

One thing I can tell you about the workshop. It’s going to be fun!

How to Get Noticed and Sell Your Book with Alexander McNabb
Self Publishing and Promoting Your Book in a Digital Age
Friday 9 March 17:00-19:00Al Waha, InterContinental Hotel
Tickets are available by clicking on this here handy, rinky-dink link.